Kumara concept sets down serious roots

Hamish Palmer's exhibition at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery.

A few years ago, a humble vegetable took sprout in artist Hamish Palmer's imagination. Palmer, who was working towards his fourth year-end show at Elam Art School, had produced a series of enormous paintings.

On the side, he was photographing kumara, posing them in urban tableaux, giving them little eyes, draping fabric around them for clothes, making characters from the knobbly veges.

"It was a side to my serious work," says the 35-year-old Wellington-based artist, who graduated from Elam in 2003 with a first class honours master of fine arts degree. "I liked the form, and I was painting them. I was also interested in anthropomorphism - I have an interest in how people project emotions and characters on to things.

"I'd be finishing documenting a painting with my camera and sneak in a couple of kumaras. When I got the films back, they had more life than those paintings."

That was the beginning of Palmer's kumara oeuvre, which has seen him develop through a series of solo and group shows in Auckland and Wellington, winning a merit award in the 2004 Waikato National Art Awards.

The kumara has not so much taken over Palmer's work, but has been along for the ride.

"I just kept going with it - the journey was about learning about photography," he says.

"Because I've been doing them for about five years, they tend to come into anything I'm interested in. Initially it was all about the kumara - when I first started doing the photos, it was all about the kumaras' relationship with New Zealand and anthropomorphism. Then it became more about the background, the situations they were in. I am always interested in the aesthetics of the work."

Palmer's new show at Vavasour Godkin comes a year after one at the same gallery where he was accused by some as being unable to move on.

So for this exhibition he has produced a written document to articulate more information, including the theory that "work sprouts from other work".

The proof is literal in the multi-media show which includes kumara sprouting from water-filled latex gloves hanging from the ceiling. "That's a different form of anthropomorphism," Palmer explains. "The thing is alive, not a static thing. There is a sense of life and energy that is amplified in the gloves. The roots grow through the fingers and they start to look like human veins."

The show also features a series of black and white photos of places that have struck a melancholic chord - an empty house being moved in Wellington; an unused church in Kaipara; the remnants of a truck in Foxton. Nary a kumara in sight but there in spirit, he says. "Everything I see I process using a kumara. The kumara are the medium."

Digital prints and superbly executed paintings complete the show, including a homage to Max Gimblett inspired by a dream in which Palmer heard the New York-based artist booming at him, "telling me what to do with a kumara, it was so real I jumped out of the bed in shock".

After completing that work - William Morris and the Pink and White Gimblett Machine - Palmer emailed a photo of the image to Gimblett, whose response was enthusiastic.

Palmer says his "affectionate relationship" with the kumara doesn't have to be something he needs to understand. "Part of this whole thing is a respect for nature. Buddhists will take an object like a flower or a stone and use it as a point for meditation. I think of Georgia O'Keeffe and her flowers. She talked about how people don't take the time to see a flower.

"That's the thing about meditation and through that, connections with the rest of the world. But when I make something, it is about the actual work. It needs to work as a painting, a composition."* Mary Abacus and the Mystery of the Kumara Sutra, by Hamish Palmer at Vavasour Godkin Gallery, 2nd floor, 35 High St, to Feb 25